Grade: C-
Charlie Kaufman is certainly the flavor of the month; nearly everyone–though not yours truly–has been singing his praises for the puerile, self-referential reworking of Susan Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief” he did for Spike Jonze in “Adaptation.” Now equal numbers of folks will probably laud him for this adaptation of Chuck Barris’ whimsically misleading autobiography. Kaufman’s work here is more mundane than it was for Jonze–he hasn’t deconstructed Barris’ tale, woven himself into it and tried to turn it into some existentialist prank; his script, in fact, is pretty faithful to the tone of the book, though it necessarily takes some liberties. In this case, however, that’s not much cause for praise, because Barris’ tome–like much of Kaufman’s work–was already self-consciously quirky and sophomoric, melding a semblance of history with lunatic falsehood in a way that the screenwriter must have found irresistible. His treatment merely highlights the peculiarities of the original, and George Clooney, in his directorial debut, then showcases the stranger elements all the more by employing every off-the-wall cinematic device within reach. He seems to have found the production equipment the biggest electric train set any boy ever had, as Orson Welles famously put it when he was making “Citizen Kane.” But “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” is no “Kane.” It’s neither revelatory nor truly edgy–merely crassly flamboyant and comedically labored.
Barris, of course, was one of the true oddities of 1960s-1970s television, the carnival-barker producer who took game and so-called “variety” shows as low as they could get, and made a mint from the result. Beginning with “The Dating Game” in 1966 and continuing through “The Newlywed Game” and the infamous “Gong Show,” which he hosted himself (with perpetually squinting eyes and tone-dead delivery), he delivered a succession of programs predicated on a constant flow of innuendo and humiliation; anyone with even the slightest claim to sophistication watched them as a guilty secret, if at all. The string of successes–and Barris’ career–ended when “Gong” and his only other surviving effort, “The $1.98 Beauty Show,” were booted out of syndication in 1980. A couple of years later he penned the book on which Clooney’s movie is based, in which he melded the story of his early life and TV career, told with typical razzmatazz, with a fanciful tale of his concomitant activity as a CIA hit-man. Maybe Barris wanted to suggest by this narrative sleight-of-hand that what he’d done to the broadcasting medium was as dastardly as what US covert operations had done to American society as a whole during the Nixon years, or to send up once again the tendency of people to fantasize about their own talents which he had so often mined in his TV projects; more likely, though, he was just goofing off, and enjoyed it when some people were obtuse enough to believe his claims. In any event, Kaufman has taken the double-life scenario that Barris invented and run with it, building his script on the same sort of dichotomy that’s been central to all his films (whether it’s the merging of personalities in “Malkovich,” the nature-or-nurture clash of “Human Nature” or the doubling-and-overlapping of “Adaptation”). Beginning with a shot of a naked, wacked-out Barris (Sam Rockwell) blankly watching television in a New York hotel room while his long-suffering girlfriend Penny (Drew Barrymore) beseeches him to open the door, the picture weaves a schizophrenic tale that, on the one hand, showily narrates Chuck’s more mundane existence–his adolescent sexual escapades, the chutzpah he demonstrated in worming his way into a job at NBC, his stint on “American Bandstand” (along with success in writing a hit tune), his cutesy meeting with the spacey Penny, and his success as a producer–with an outrageous story involving his supposed “other life” as a government operative, recruited by stern, weird Jim Byrd (Clooney) to use his TV life as a cover to undertake officially-sponsored assassinations. Intercutting episodes from the two sides of Barris’ “life,” the film works its way to a last act in which both are falling apart–on the one hand, his broadcasting empire is crumbling, and on the other he finds himself targeted by the KGB and not knowing whom to trust.
In transferring this Barris-Kaufman concoction onto the screen, Clooney makes use of much that he’s learned from his work with other directors. He’s adopted a very stylized approach, with lots of striking compositions and unusual camera moves, and has assembled a capable behind-the- scenes team: James O. Bissell’s production design, Isabelle Guay’s art direction and Newton Thomas Sigel’s cinematography are all carefully calibrated to achieve maximum effect. He further inserts interview moments with a number of Barris’ old associates (Dick Clark, Jaye P. Morgan, and others) to lend a phony sense of “reality” to the proceedings (a tactic reminiscent of what Woody Allen did, though to much greater effect, in “Zelig”). But the often exquisite technical aspects of the picture aren’t equaled by the more human side of things. The performances are uneven. Rockwell is one of those unfortunate actors who’s had a succession of “breakthrough” roles, none of which have actually broken through to stardom; this is another of them. (There’s hope, though: the same affliction beset Dennis Quaid, and with “The Rookie” and “Far from Heaven” this year, he seems finally to have gotten over the hump.) Rockwell throws himself completely into the role of Barris, and though he’s really too tall and good-looking for it, he gets by; unfortunately, there’s too much of the caricature in Kaufman’s depiction, and it handicaps the actor. (Too much nudity, too: perhaps after “Solaris” Clooney wanted to impose the derriere shot on someone else, but the repetition of it here is frequent enough to become a motif.) Barrymore seems a trifle at sea as Penny (though Penny probably was, too), and Clooney does another of his darkly comic supporting turns as Byrd (though he was more amusing in “Welcome to Collinwood”–as was Rockwell, actually). Rutger Hauer shows up to good effect as a drunkenly over-the-hill agent, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is fine as well, but Julia Roberts comes off poorly as a femme fatale agent with whom Barris supposedly gets involved; their last scene together is a real clunker–a send-up that never takes off. Two other pals of the Soderbergh-Clooney pack, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, show up for a “Dating Game” cameo that, given the fact it’s a pretty obvious joke, is mercifully brief.
As for Kaufman, his script for “Being John Malkovich” remains a brilliant flight of fancy, but more and more it seems to have been a fluke. “Human Nature,” “Adaptation” and now “Confessions” suggest that he’s mostly an overreacher, the screenwriting equivalent of a freshman philosophy student dying to show off his erudition but whose garbled disquisitions are much too ostentatiously clever for their own good.